The Write Way To Make Money Online

By Andrew Shim
One money making opportunity everyone should have a go at is blogging for profits. There are literally millions of blogs today, dealing with everything from serious technical stuff to the daily experiences of ordinary teenagers. Simply put, a blog is an electronic journal (diary) that you can update anytime, anywhere as long as you have an internet connection.
Here are a couple of reasons why you should try blogging for profits :
Starting a blog is easyThere are lots of online tools that allow you to build a blog by simple clicking a few buttons and making a few selections. Sites like Blogger and Wordpress offer free blogs to anyone who wants to have one. They make the set up procedure painless, and you can have your blog up and running in a few minutes! Take time to learn the basics of running your blog. With time, you will be a real pro and ready to take on the next challenge – setting up your own blog with your own domain name!
Write about any topic under the sunThink about what you're passionate about – that topic that you could talk about for hours on end. That's your topic! There IS no right or wrong topic for a blog. You'd be surprised that even blogs about everyday "mundane" stuff like cooking and cleaning house can attract a large audience. If you're not used to writing, it's okay. Just write as if you were talking to your best friend. Don't worry about not knowing everything you write about. Every blogger learns as he/she goes along and interacts with his/her audience.
Lots of money making opportunities for bloggersThe easiest way to make money with your blog is join a pay-per-click (PPC) program as a publisher. It won't cost you anything. You paste a small piece of "code/script" into your webpages that will display advertisements on your blog. You will earn money every time someone clicks on these ads. The amount you earn for each click depends on the type of ads that are displayed. The more competitive ad categories will earn you more. There are many types of PPC programs that you might want to consider, but I would recommend the Google Adsense program. Thousands of web publishers are making good money simply by letting Google place relevant ads on their websites or blogs.
PPC is not the only way to make money with your blog. You can sell advertisement space directly to advertisers or though a broker (which is easier), or you could place advertisements that link to products or services that relate to your blog. You make money if the person clicks on this ad and purchases that product. This is called affiliate marketing.
Blog at your own paceThe beauty of blogging for profits is that you can treat it like a part-time hobby, a freelance cash earner or a serious money making business. There's no right or wrong way to blog. But chances are, when you see the money coming in from your blogging efforts, you are going to want to find out how you can make more! Many blogging moms are content to post every other week, satisfied with the income they derive from this pace. Then there are the mom-turned-professional bloggers who actually build a solid and steady income from blogging. It's up to you!
So is it that easy? Yes and no… (Don't you just hate these kinds of answers?)
Yes because, with money making programs like PPC, you CAN make extra money. No because you won't make ridiculous amounts of money overnight. Like any other business or website, blogs take time to reach their full potential.
The larger your audience, the better your prospects of making more money. The key is to write about stuff that you love, yet interests and excites your audience. Eventually, as you let your personality shine through your blog, you will get a faithful group of readers who probably will end up being your friends! It's going to take patience, but if you love the topic that you write about, it's going to be lots of fun blogging for profits.
Andrew Shim is the owner and editor of PositiveMoneyIdeas.com a website which offers home business ideas to Make Money. Visit Andrew at his blog, Home With Andrew.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Shim

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

By Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff
You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?
Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.
1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.
Http://www.bloglet.com
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)
http://www.my.yahoo.com
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.
http://www.pingomatic.com
5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com
6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.
9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.
10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.
12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.
To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm
13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts
14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.
15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).
16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.
Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com
Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Denise_Wakeman